On Tuesday, August 18, 2015 at 7:39:45 PM UTC-6, Dan Daly wrote:
On Tuesday, August 18, 2015 at 8:17:51 PM UTC-4, wrote:
On Tuesday, August 18, 2015 at 8:03:25 PM UTC-4, Martin Gregorie wrote:
On Tue, 18 Aug 2015 14:49:52 -0700, Bob Pasker wrote:

Graduated training flights. It would be great if the locals would put up
on their website some proposed training flights of increasing difficulty
suited to the terrain and the typical weather of for the area. These
graduated training flights should be structured around Silver Distance,
Gold Distance, and Diamond Goal. For example, for Silver Distance as a
triangle, there could be two practice flights, out and back to each of
the other two points on the triangle, and then the third for all three
points.

Just wanna pick one nit: hope you don't mind. You can't use a 50km closed
course for Silver C because its essentially awarded for a straight flight
of 50km, presumably to get you used to going out of gliding range from
home. Without that restriction you'd get people drawing a roughly
equilateral 50km triangle centred on the home airfield. But that wouldn't
really be an XC at all because its furthest points are barely 12 miles
from home.

Is the 100km diploma recognised in America? If so, just double the
triangle size and you've got a nice sized closed course for a new XC
pilot to tackle after the Silver distance. Besides, 50 km to gold 300 is
a bit of a leap. Even an older glider can do 100 km in 2 hours or less so
changing weather conditions probably isn't an issue, but even a mid-range
toy (Pegase or ASW-20) is going to need 4 - 4.5 hours to do 300 km in the
hands of a relative novice and so dealing with changing conditions, due
to both the time of day and to flying into different parts of the
country, become relevant.

But I agree that having a set of recognised club tasks is a good idea,
and even better if a few of them have a perpetual trophy for the fastest
flight during the year.


--
martin@ | Martin Gregorie
gregorie. | Essex, UK
org |

Unless there has been a change that I am not aware of, one can declare a remote start point, fly to a remote finish. and return to the home base. Altitude loss is calculated from release height to height at finish point. The task some of our folks have done for this turns out to require about a 130k flight which seems about right if one is flying modern glass.
UH

No change - yet. In the Sporting Code that will become effective 1 Oct 2015:

"a. SILVER DISTANCE A distance flight (as defined in 1.4.2d to 1.4.2h) to a finish or turn point at least 50 km from release or MoP stop."

Look at http://www.fai.org/igc-documents , then Sporting Code, then Next Edition.

The current SC3 allows it; if anyone wants to do it as described above, the time is now (until 30 September).

Martin, the 100 km Diploma is not recognized in North America.

2D

For young pilots we, in the US, do have the Kolstad Century Awards, which can be qualifying flights for the Kolstad College Scholarship, currently $5000. Applications due September 30th.

If you ever needed a reason to mentor a junior pilot to fly cross country, you have one. FAI Silver badges or better also are qualifying flights.

http://www.ssa.org/Youth?show=blog&id=2406

Frank Whiteley